What Can a Weak and Hobbled Russia Do Against the US?

 New Russian Subs Able to Deep Dive and…

"We are now confirming once again that playing with fire - and they are like small children playing with matches - is a very dangerous thing for grown-up uncles and aunts who are entrusted with nuclear weapons in one or another Western country… Americans unequivocally associate conversations about Third World War as something that, God forbid, if it happens, will affect Europe exclusively.”

Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, clarifying his country’s willingness to use nuclear weapons, at a recent press conference in Moscow.

"When cables are sabotaged in international waters, there is no regime to hold the perpetrator accountable."

Report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies

There’s been a lot of saber-rattling – even out-and-out threats from Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and even President Vladimir Putin himself – escalating at every turn. On August 26th, Russia mounted its greatest aerial attack of Ukraine, focused heavily on the power grid/generating systems and the water/sewage systems all across the nation. Moscow’s threats of a nuclear response within the context of WWIII are coming with increasing frequency and intensity. Reuters (August 27th) reminds us: “Russia's 2020 nuclear doctrine sets out when its president would consider using a nuclear weapon: broadly as a response to an attack using nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction or conventional weapons ‘when the very existence of the state is put under threat’.”

The above Lavrov quote emphasizes that Russia believes that NATO’s support for Ukraine, which now occupies one Russian border Oblast and is touting its internally developed missile capacity able to reach distant Russian targets, is beginning to cross a red line, justifying an extreme response directly against NATO nations. No one in the West believes that Russia would launch strategic (the big blast) or even tactical (a narrow-focused blast) nuclear weapons against anyone.

Still, since new M1 tanks and F-16s being delivered to now-trained Ukraine forces, there are increasing concerns in the West that some lesser but highly destructive attacks, by Russian operatives or even direct military force, are being seriously contemplated by Moscow. Some high-ranking Russian leaders are even thinking that such lesser attacks could even lead to a Trump victory in November… as possible serious disruptions within the US itself would taint the Harris candidacy, and bring back the man Putin knows how to control.

But what kinds of counter attacks could these lesser efforts be… strong enough to make Americans squirm and want out… but not so disruptive as to demand that the US treat such actions as a definite beginning of WWIII? Tom Porter, writing for the August 27th BusinessInsider.com points out what those efforts might be, under a headline that reads “Russia is signaling it could take out the West's internet and GPS. There's no good backup plan”:

• Russia is likely mapping underwater internet cables, a NATO official said.
• The country is also believed to be behind flight GPS interference.
• It's signaling it could wreak havoc with the West's electronic infrastructure, experts say.

The vast network of undersea fiber-optic cables that transfer data between continents is indeed vulnerable to hostile powers, including Russia, the Center for Strategic and International Studies warned in a report this month.

In May, NATO's intelligence chief David Cattler warned that Russia may be planning to target the cables in retribution for the West's support for Ukraine in its war against Russia.

It's a scenario that has NATO's planners increasingly worried.

If the cables are seriously damaged or disabled, swaths of the internet services we take for granted and that our economies rely on, including calls, financial transactions, and streaming, would be wiped out.

Carl-Oskar Bohlin, Sweden's minister for civil defense, said damage to a telecommunications cable running under the Baltic Sea in 2023 was the result of ‘external force or tampering,’ though he did not provide details.

And in June, NATO stepped up aircraft patrols off the coast of Ireland amid concerns about Russian submarine activity, The Sunday Times reported.

The threat to GPS

Security analysts say that the internet is not the only network that Russia is probing for vulnerabilities.

In recent months, Russia has been accused of interfering with GPS navigation systems, causing havoc on commercial airline routes. As a result, flights from Helsinki to Tartu, Estonia, ground to a halt for a month in April.

Melanie Garson, an international security expert at University College London, said it was part of Russia's ‘gray zone’ campaign against the West, which involves covert actions that fall below the threshold of open warfare.

But when you realize that our entire financial system, from banking to international trade to consumer purchases to internal cyber systems could be brought to their knees by well-placed hacking, you begin to have a glimmer of what they can do. Russia has unleashed Russian hackers, even helped them with needed software, to have their way with ransomware, extortion and cybercrimes against any Western targets… from massive companies, sensitive military installations, power grids, even gasoline pumps to hospitals and public schools. And exactly what would we do without GPS? Especially military-targeting GPS? Russian subs are clearly able to cut cables (or tap into them), and Russia has the largest and most modern fleet of ice breakers ready to dominate climate change’s gift to Arctic nations: a genuine Northwest Passage.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while Russian autocrats do not know how to run a viable economy or provide for their own citizens, they still have sufficient technology to play a very dangerous game of cat and mouse with the West.